All posts tagged ‘the guild’

The Guild‘s new season premieres today on YouTube, and it looks to be a good one. New episodes of the web series have for the last several seasons premiered on XBox Live, but with the advent of the Geek & Sundry channel on YouTube back in April — a channel co-founded by The Guild creator/writer/star Felicia Day — it’s back premiering on YouTube where it started.

Season 6 of The Guild will see Day’s character, Codex, starting a job working on the MMORPG she plays and loves. Of course, working on a game isn’t quite the same as playing it, which she finds out all too quickly. It should be interesting, not to mention funny, to see how her Guildies deal with her new job, and the official press release for the new season promises appearances by “special guest stars from The Guild seasons past as well as notables from the video games industry and YouTube community.”

As if that weren’t enough, Geek & Sundry has also announced a new series, called Space Janitors. From the press release:

Space Janitors is a satirical and irreverent sci-fi comedy about life aboard an iconic evil space station as seen through the eyes of Mike and Darby, two custodians trying to keep things clean in the midst of an intergalactic civil war. Remember, for every Dark Lord there’s 10,000 minions that need working toilets.

Sounds like something that network TV would screw up completely, but that Geek & Sundry should be able to make awesome and very funny.

The Guild Season 6 starts later today. Space Janitors premieres on October 30. Both series will be on the Geek & Sundry channel on YouTube, which you should subscribe to if you haven’t already — it doesn’t just help you find new episodes, but also makes it more likely that the channel will stick around, so it’s a win-win.

Today marks the 33rd anniversary of the birth of the incredibly talented geek and latter-day geek icon known as Felicia Day. Day first became known to the geek community for her recurring role as Vi in the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and since then has beamed up to geek stardom via her role as Penny in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, the recently resurrected Dr. Holly Martin on Eureka and, especially, for her truly awesome web series The Guild. And, to top it all off, she’s the evil mastermind behind one of the best YouTube channels going: Geek and Sundry.

All of us at GeekDad are huge Felicia Day fans, and wish her the very happiest of birthdays! We also feel that, as geeks, it behooves us to mention that Day’s first name means “happiness,” so that means her name is two-thirds of the phrase “happy birthday.” Sort of.

Please join us in wishing Ms. Day a happy, geeky birthday, and many more! Leave birthday greetings in a comment if you’re so inclined. And if you are yet untouched by The Guild, you owe it to yourself to remedy the situation.

Note: A version of this article was published on GeekDad on June 28, 2011.

So far, I’ve only had time to watch Table Top, in which Wil plays the excellent game Small World with Grant Imahara (of MythBusters fame), Sean Plott (AKA “Day[9]“), and Jenna Busch. It’s a lot of fun — I highly recommend it, particularly if you’ve never played the game before.

If you haven’t been following the Dragon Age: Redemption web series, you owe it to yourself to watch it now. The videogame tie-in series, written by and starring the always-excellent Felicia Day, wraps up Tuesday. You’ll enjoy it if you’re even slightly interested in role-playing videogames, and probably even if you aren’t.

The series features an elven assassin named Tallis, played by Day, who is on a quest to take down a rogue mage who has been wreaking havoc and generally doing evil things.

Tallis is not your typical fantasy protagonist — she’s headstrong and more than a bit sarcastic — and that in itself is enough of a twist to keep the series interesting. But there’s also a strong supporting cast — mostly in the group of diverse characters Tallis meets up with on her journey who become her adventure party.

The special effects are spare, but used to good effect, and in fine fantasy-video-RPG tradition there are plenty of blood spurts, but nothing more gory than that.

In fact, the series’ adherence to fantasy-video-RPG visuals is one of the things that makes Dragon Age: Redemption a pleasure to watch. The fight scenes are all meticulously choreographed, but if you’re looking for realism you’ll be disappointed — they’re made to look like the fight scenes in the Dragon Age games. If you’ve played the games, you’ll recognize many of the moves the characters make, and they all go toward making the series seem like a videogame brought to life.

If you haven’t been following the Dragon Age: Redemption web series, you owe it to yourself to watch it now. The videogame tie-in series, written by and starring the always-excellent Felicia Day, wraps up Tuesday. You’ll enjoy it if you’re even slightly interested in role-playing videogames, and probably even if you aren’t.

The series features an elven assassin named Tallis, played by Day, who is on a quest to take down a rogue mage who has been wreaking havoc and generally doing evil things.

Tallis is not your typical fantasy protagonist — she’s headstrong and more than a bit sarcastic — and that in itself is enough of a twist to keep the series interesting. But there’s also a strong supporting cast — mostly in the group of diverse characters Tallis meets up with on her journey who become her adventure party.

The special effects are spare, but used to good effect, and in fine fantasy-video-RPG tradition there are plenty of blood spurts, but nothing more gory than that.

In fact, the series’ adherence to fantasy-video-RPG visuals is one of the things that makes Dragon Age: Redemption a pleasure to watch. The fight scenes are all meticulously choreographed, but if you’re looking for realism you’ll be disappointed — they’re made to look like the fight scenes in the Dragon Age games. If you’ve played the games, you’ll recognize many of the moves the characters make, and they all go toward making the series seem like a videogame brought to life.

If there are still any doubters out there that The Guild, created and helmed by modern geek icon Felicia Day, has truly hit the big time, this should silence them: The new episode, titled “Costume Contest,” features a guest appearance by none other than all-time geek icon Stan Lee.

Lee makes a lot of cameos, of course, and always as himself or (as he did recently on Eureka, for example) a version of himself. This time is no exception on that front, but I wonder if this is the first web series he’s appeared in (the press release I got didn’t say, but I think it might be). I’m fairly certain this is the first time he’s been abducted by Master Chiefs, though. Enjoy!

It’s not as though The Guild needed any help being one of the best sources of geeky entertainment available right now. Now in its fifth season, geek icon Felicia Day’s brainchild web series, about a group of online gamers who meet and interact in real life, is one of the very few true success stories in its medium. The series has had plenty of guest stars before, including GeekDad favorite Wil Wheaton in a great long-term recurring role, but today’s new episode breaks new ground in geeky awesomeness.

The new episode, the sixth of Season 5, is called “Revolving Doors,” and features several awesome guest appearances. It would be cool enough if they just had Doug Jones — best known as Abe Sapien in the Hellboy movies and as the Silver Surfer in the largely-forgettable Fantastic Four sequel — in a role as a steampunker at the convention (Megagame-O-Ramacon, where Season 5 takes place). It would be cooler still that Maurissa Tancharoen, writer for several TV shows and co-writer of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which propelled Day to geek stardom, plays Jones’s fellow steampunker. But the episode achieves dizzying heights of geekiness by featuring an appearance by Captain Tightpants (and of course Day’s Dr. Horrible co-star) himself, Nathan Fillion.

Yes, Fillion, who hardly needs to do anything else to cement his standing as one of the most prominent geek icons alive but never seems to let that stop him, makes an appearance in the episode as well — as, according to the press release about the episode, “a big star seeking advice” who crosses paths with Vork, as you can see in the photo above.

As with all of The Guild‘s recent episodes, the new one is available now, and exclusively until 12:01AM Pacific Time Thursday, on Xbox Live and Zune marketplace. Starting at 12:01AM PT Thursday, it will be available on MSN and Bing, and we will also put in an embed of it below, so you can save yourself the trouble of looking for it and just bookmark this article and come back to it after that time.

We don’t make a secret of our appreciation for Wil Wheaton here on GeekDad. Speaking for myself, I’ve been a great fan of his writing since I started reading his blog about ten years ago, and I’m among those who think he’s a much better actor than the way the character of Wesley Crusher was written could demonstrate. It’s great to see his acting career enjoy a bit of a renaissance, with his guest spots on (among other things) The Big Bang Theory and, more significantly, his major recurring role on the geeky science-fiction TV series Eureka and his co-starring role on the awesomely geeky web series The Guild.

Today is Wil’s 39th birthday, and we couldn’t let that go by unnoticed on our part — because in addition to being an excellent actor and writer, Wil is also a great geek dad to his (step)sons Nolan and Ryan. He’s written often over the years of how he got both of his kids interested in geeky pursuits not by any directed campaign but just by making them understand that the reason he wanted to share those things with them was simply because they were one heck of a lot of fun. I only hope that, when my kids reach the ages that Wil’s sons are (if I’m not mistaken, one is about 22 and the other about 20), they’re as good people and geeks as his are.

Wil Wheaton at w00tstock 3.0

I saw Wil just eight days ago at w00stock 3.0 in San Diego, and he was — as I’d expected — a lot of fun both as part-time emcee and participant in several bits. I reflected on the fact that if I could tell my 14-year-old self, as he sat watching the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, that 24 years hence he’d be sitting in a theatre with 1,000-plus other people watching a geeky variety show co-headlined by the guy who played Wesley, he would be sure I was kidding. Just goes to show that in the geek world today there are tons of opportunities to remake your image, if you’ve got the brains, talent, and ambition to make something of them.

So please join all of us at GeekDad in wishing Wil Wheaton a very happy 39th birthday, and many more to come! (In fact, if he goes the Jack Benny route, he could have nothing but 39th birthdays from now on.) You can even tweet him or Google+ him your birthday wishes, if you like. EDIT: You should also check out GeekMom’s very funny piece for Wil’s birthday today.

Today marks the 32nd anniversary of the birth of the incredibly talented geek and latter-day geek icon known as Felicia Day. Day first became known to the geek community for her recurring role as Vi in the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and since then has beamed up to geek stardom via her role as Penny in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and, especially, for her truly awesome web series The Guild.

All of us at GeekDad are huge Felicia Day fans, and wish her the very happiest of birthdays! We also feel that, as geeks, it behooves us to mention that Day’s first name means “happiness,” so that means her name is two-thirds of the phrase “happy birthday.” Sort of.

Please join us in wishing Ms. Day a happy, geeky birthday, and many more! Leave birthday greetings in a comment if you’re so inclined. And if you are yet untouched by The Guild, you owe it to yourself to remedy the situation.

Note: A version of this article was published on GeekDad on June 28, 2010.